Really? So just because AWS doesn't meet your classification of a modern, standard way of doing things, you abandon it? Replacing a working system for those reasons is a funny mindset... and one of the benefits of opening a 'contest' is to look at new ideas with an open attitude. Who is to say that something even better won't come out of this experiment?

It sounds to me like you may just want to bash NetFlix (as if they need any help from you) - they have demonstrated that they are perfectly able to do that themselves!

Sounds more like the point is big users of capacity should promote a cloud free market in which there's a real choice. Amazon has been great about lowering prices, but perhaps it would lower prices even more if it had real competition. Trouble is, it's tough for anybody except those operating at Google or, perhaps, Microsoft scale to achieve or even approach the economies of scale already established by Amazon.

There should be a techblog.netflix.com post in the next day or so that will give more context to the Cloud Prize and clarify most of the points above. However I will address some of the specific issues here.

Cloud 1.0 vs. 2.0?I would argue that the way most people are doing cloud today is to forklift part of their existing architecture into a cloud and run a hybrid setup. That's what I would call Cloud 1.0. What Netflix has done is show how to build much more agile green field native cloud applications, which might justify being called Cloud 2.0. The specific IaaS provider used underneath, and whether you do this with public or private clouds is irrelevant to the architectural constructs we've explained.

OutagesThe outages that have been mentioned were regional, they didn't apply to Netflix operations in Europe for example. Our current work is to build tooling for multi-regional support on AWS (East cosat/West coast), including the DNS management that was mentioned. This removes the failure mode with the least effort and disruption to our existing operations.

PortabilityOther cloud vendors have a feature set and scale comparable to AWS in 2008-2009. We're still waiting for them to catch up. There are many promises but nothing usable for Netflix itself. However there is demand to use NetflixOSS for other smaller and simpler applications, in both public and private clouds, and Eucalyptus have demonstrated Asgard, Edda and Chaos Monkey running, and will ship soon in Eucalyptus 3.3. There are signs of interest from people to add the missing features to OpenStack, CloudStack and Google Compute so that NetflixOSS can also run on them.

EddaYou've completely missed the point of Edda. It does three important things. 1) if you run at large scale your automation will overload the cloud API endpoint, Edda buffers this information and provides a query capability for efficient lookups. 2) Edda stores a history of your config, it's a CMDB that can be used to query for what changed. 3) Edda cross integrates multiple data sources, the cloud API, our own service registry Eureka, Appdynamics call flow information and can be extended to include other data sources.

AMInatorIf you want to spin up 500 identical instances, having them each run Chef or Puppet after they boot creates a failure mode dependency on the Chef/Puppet service, wastes startup time, and if anything can go wrong with the install you end up with an inconsistent set of instances. By using AMInator to run Chef once at build time, there is less to go wrong at run time. It also makes red/black pushes and roll-backs trivial and reliable.

Cloud PrizeThe prize includes a portability category. It's a broad category and might be won by someone who adds new language support to NetflixOSS (Erlang, Go, Ruby?) or someone who makes parts of NetflixOSS run on a broader range of IaaS options. The reality is that AWS is actually dominating cloud deployments today, so contributions that run on AWS will have the greatest utility by the largest number of people. The alternatives to AWS are being hyped by everyone else, and are showing some promise, but have some way to go.

We hope that NetflixOSS provides a useful driver for higher baseline functionality that more IaaS APIs can converge on, and move from 2008-era EC2 functionality to 2010-era EC2 functionality across more vendors. Meanwhile Netflix itself will be enjoying the benefits of 2013 AWS functionality like RedShift.

The point is that Netflix is holding a developer competition which--as it is designed--will likely produce tools and encourage practices more consistent with "clouding computing v1.0". It's fairly clear how tools should be built to work with multiple clouds--where you should build abstraction layers, and how you should embrace more open standards and choices instead of choosing proprietary ones. Most of Netflix's tools don't do that today (and in particular, Asgard's place at the center of things and reliance upon so many proprietary AWS services and API calls), and how the tools are currently built and how the contest is designed are all pointing off in a direction that goes away from a multi-cloud, standardized-configuration-management design.

Look, if this were Microsoft hosting a contest to improve its cloud tools, what I wrote would be a non-story--of course we should all be skeptical about whether what Microsoft is offering would be best-of-breed and useful. The problem is that very few people in the cloud world (at least those to whom I've spoken) seem to be viewing this Netflix/AWS contest (let's not leave AWS out, since it's very, very clearly a joint contest, with Werner and the AWS prizes) with a similar skeptical eye.

Wow--nothing in my piece says anything about AWS not being modern or me abandoning it. AWS still gets the vast majority of my cloud spend today, and I think it's a wonderful service.

The point is that a *cloud architecture* that *only works with one cloud* is not a good cloud architecture going forward. Good cloud architectures will work with multiple clouds. If I am hiring you as a cloud architect today, and you tell me that you are going to create a greenfield cloud architecture that is going to hook directly into AWS APIs and that you are fundamentally uninterested in testing or supporting any other clouds in the future, then I would fire you on the spot.

I am also a big fan of Netflix's services, of their corporate culture, and of the fact that they're willing to be so open about so many things, including releasing so much source code. (I think I've been a Netflix member for more than 10 years now). The problem is that I am concerned about the vast number of people and organizations who are going to take Netflix's cloud deployment as a reference architecture, which will help Netflix, but will fundamentally set cloud architecture practices back to 2010.

All that said, if the result of this contest is to bring Netflix's tools into the future and make them multi-cloud, and use standardized configuration management, then that will be excellent (as I say at the end of my piece). However, for the many reasons I outlined in my piece, I am deeply skeptical of whether that will happen.

Yes, I absolutely agree with this. Big users of capacity need to have architectures that can take advantage of multiple IaaS vendors (and I agree that we're only really looking at Google and Microsoft, at least today), and need to not look like Netflix's architecture, which requires so many proprietary AWS services (e.g., DynamoDB) as it stands today.

I read this as a "tree" response to a "forest" issue, but I'll respond with respect to both forest and trees.

The forest is this: Netflix's cloud architecture--as seen through public talks and open source code--is fundamentally (a) so intertwined with AWS as to be essentially inseparable, and (b) significantly behind the best *general* open options for configuration management and orchestration. It also is far from "the Unix way" of having encapsulated/abstracted tools that can be interchanged with others to build a best-in-breed architecture.

Your answer doesn't really do anything to do address this "forest" argument: you defend the complete reliance that Netflix and (most of) its tools have on AWS based upon an analytical database that is really beside the point as far as cloud architectures go. (Don't get me wrong--I think RedShift is *awesome*, but its presence is completely irrelevant to a generalized reference cloud architecture, which is the power of NetflixOSS that's so concerning).

Your defense of AMInator and Edda (I wish you'd defend Asgard also!) is ultimately a defense of why those solutions work for Netflix and its application and current architecture--but that's not the point. Obviously you're a smart and capable architect and you have reasons for using them at Netflix. The point is that--as they stand today--they're not promoting good *generalized* application architectures. You should be promoting Chef before you promote a tool that essentially encourages people make horrible design decisions (in lieu of using Chef at all). You should be defending Netflix tools based upon standardized, reference deployments, not based on launching 500 VMs of the same exact machine which *is not exactly a common use case for the cloud*.

Look--it's possible to write awesome and fabulous PHP code, but most PHP developers don't. One of the reasons why Netflix is now choosing Python is because the generalized Python developer writes consistent and good code. (We chose Python for the same reasons you did). But to someone who has no idea what a good cloud deployment looks like, the way AMInator sits out there--you're going to see a lot more people like the guy super-psyched to have built 25,000 AMIs over Twitter.

The overall point of the piece is this: Netflix has a lot of power and clout in the cloud architecture world, and there are a whole lot of people looking to Netflix for guidance on how to deploy on the cloud. Netflix has made some choices (the "forest" above) that are flat-out bad choices if you take anything like a long-term approach to your cloud architecture. There is no historical precedent that you can cite as being a good example for being so intertwined with a single IT vendor. And it's way more important for people deploying on the cloud to know and understand configuration management than it is for them to have a tool that--as far as its public users go--are using to bypass CM entirely.

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